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CoronaCheck #31
With a court hearing over a Black Lives Matter protest planned for Sydney next week, and renewed media coverage of a similar rally held in Melbourne back in June, we've revisited our previous reporting on the protest's supposed links to a surge in coronavirus cases in Victoria.
We've also got more information on masks, which are now mandatory in Melbourne, and check in with US President Donald Trump and his newfound love of beans.
In this edition:
Explaining the Black Lives Matter 'links' to Melbourne's coronavirus surge
Suggestions of a link between a Black Lives Matter rally held in Melbourne on June 6 and an outbreak of coronavirus cases in public housing towers continue to spread, with NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller this week adding fuel to the fire.
Speaking on Sydney radio station 2GB before a court hearing on a Black Lives Matter protest planned for Sydney next week, Commissioner Fuller said that based on "some pretty good intelligence out of Victoria" he knew "how dangerous these protests can be in terms of health".
"From our perspective it was obviously big numbers in Victoria, a number of people who came to the protest were living in those vertical towers so that certainly is enough for me."
But in a statement to the ABC last week, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) said that of the six protesters who subsequently tested positive to COVID-19, none were known to live in a "major public housing complex".
Commissioner Fuller's remarks come in the wake of a report in The Australian that Victorian health authorities had "confirmed a link between two COVID-19 cases in people who attended the Black Lives Matter protest and the cluster of at least 242 cases in public housing towers in the city's inner northwest".
"While the confirmation stops short of establishing the protest as a cause of the public housing megacluster, it demonstrates clear links between the mass gathering, attendees who tested positive, and the state's largest COVID-19 cluster to date," The Australian said.
According to the report, two Northland H&M employees who tested positive for COVID-19 attended the protests. These workers formed part of a larger cluster of coronavirus cases initially named as the H&M cluster but later reclassified as the North Melbourne family cluster.
It is the North Melbourne family cluster which the DHHS said was linked to the outbreak in the North Melbourne housing tower.
"Cases linked to the North Melbourne towers have links to other cases across Melbourne, including the North Melbourne family outbreak," The Australian quotes a DHHS spokesman as saying.
"It is not clear which direction the virus was transmitted in. In many cases, we will never know for sure how large clusters began and the order in which the virus spread."
The Australian's report prompted former Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy to suggest Fact Check issue a correction on a past CoronaCheck newsletter, published in June, which queried the evidence for assertions about links between the protests and the surge in cases.
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"[The DHHS] continues to report that the current burst of cases does not stem from the rally," Fact Check said at the time.
"They have said that while one protester "may have been infectious at the rally", two others who have since tested positive for COVID-19 were not infectious at the rally, nor is there evidence they contracted the virus at the rally."
The DHHS statement last week maintains that there is "no evidence to suggest" any person contracted COVID-19 at the protest.
The report in The Australian, as well as similar reports from other news sites, were shared widely, including by Senator Pauline Hanson, Victorian federal Liberal MP Jason Wood and Avi Yemini, a far-right figure with 115,000 Twitter followers.
Fact Check found no evidence that a follow up report from the Australian, which clarified that the DHHS said there was no evidence that the six protesters who had tested positive for COVID-19 had acquired the virus at the rally, was shared by Senator Hanson or Mr Wood. Mr Yemini dismissed the report in a tweet.
Outdated advice masking the facts
Commentators and social media activists are using out-of-date advice on the use of masks to peddle misinformation in the wake of the Victorian Government's announcement that face coverings would be mandatory for residents of lockdown areas.
On Sunday, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt questioned whether there was any medical basis to the decision to make masks mandatory, and quoted World Health Organisation advice against the wide use of face masks in the community.
But that advice is outdated.
In a document published over three months ago, the World Health Organisation stated that "the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence".
Advice published by the organisation in June, however, says that masks should be worn by the general population where there is widespread community transmission or where physical distancing cannot be adhered to, such as on public transport or in "specific working conditions".
Meanwhile, while Federal Government advice against the "routine use of masks in the community" cited by Bolt remains current, it stipulates that this is only the case while "the rate of community transmission of COVID-19 is low".
Speaking to Seven News, infectious diseases physician and microbiologist Peter Collignon said there was enough community spread in Melbourne to justify mandatory masks.
"Whenever you've got a lot of community transmission — and Melbourne seems to be in that situation at the moment — wearing masks makes a difference," Professor Collignon said.
Facebook groups popular with conspiracy theorists have also used the Federal Government advice, as well as months-old news reports, to advocate against mandatory mask wearing.
As we reported last week, a systematic review published in The Lancet in early June found that close fitting respirators could reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission by up to 95 per cent, and masks up to 67 per cent.
From Washington, D.C.
If it were any other president, an outrage centred around cans of beans might constitute a rare and bizarre moment. For US President Trump, however, it was just another week in the White House.
In photos reminiscent of those usually posted by resourceful Instagram influencers, Mr Trump and his daughter Ivanka — who is also an adviser to the President — posed with cans of beans produced by the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the US, Goya Foods.
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The photos came after Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue praised Mr Trump during an event at the White House, prompting a backlash from America's large Latino community, including calls for a boycott of the brand.
The photos were so out of the ordinary that fact checkers at Snopes found it was necessary to confirm that Mr Trump really did take a photo with food products inside the Oval Office.
Snopes also confirmed that the Goya CEO did indeed praise Mr Trump, finding that glowing reviews of the President, including that Americans were blessed to have a leader like him, were correctly attributed to Mr Unanue.
But claims that Goya products had run off the shelves despite the calls for a boycott are false, according to fact checkers at Reuters, who found that a photo showing bare shelves dates back to the panic-buying days of March.
In other news
The language used in Australian misinformation campaigns surrounding the rollout and use of 5G mobile technology can be traced back to pro-Kremlin news websites according to a researcher at the Australian National University.
Michael Jensen, an associate professor at the University of Canberra's Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis writes in The Conversation that sentiments contained in some of the more than 500 submissions to the parliamentary inquiry on the launch of 5G in Australia mirror those pushed by large conspiracy websites which have been identified as "promoting narratives consistent with Russian misinformation operations".
Anti-5G stories published by those websites had been published to at least 10 public Facebook groups, two of which were specifically targeted at Australians. According to Dr Jensen's research, submissions to the inquiry used language similar to posts in conspiracy Facebook groups.
"My findings suggest Facebook conspiracy groups and potentially other conspiracy sites are attempting to co-opt [the parliamentary inquiry] process to directly influence the way Australians think about 5G."
Edited by Ellen McCutchan
Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au
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2020-07-23 23:24:00Z
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